Most of us only think about movement when something hurts.
But what if that pain is your body's way of warning you that
something is out of balance? We do not feel pain in our body,
it's our brain that interprets and produces what pain mean.
For Vinny Crispino, an 8 time All American athlete who broke
his back and spent years chasing relief, that realization changed
everything. My brain got so good at
rehearsing pain long after the herniations healed, long after
the fracture healed, even basic sensation was triggering a pain
alarm. He uncovered a connection
between pain, movement and mindfulness that most people
never see. You have to heal the nervous
system. It's the driver.
Though it might not have started the fire, it's what's keeping it
alive. So whether you're rebuilding
from injury or just trying to future proof your body, this
episode will challenge everything you thought you knew
about how the body heals and stays strong.
Let's dig in. Vinny, welcome.
Thanks for having me we're. Doing something a little
different this episode, as anyone who is watching can
already tell, we are in a squatted position.
I heard you say in another podcast that you were on that I
listened to, that you had been, I think it was mentioned like
towards towards the end that you were in a squatted position for
the entire time. And so I took that as a
challenge to be in a squatting position the whole time while we
record. We'll see how how far we make
it. I'm sure you you will make it a
lot longer than. That so far so good.
We're doing great. It's a good start.
But what people do not know is that we've already been
squatting for quite some time while the crew has set up the
lighting and the audio and all that.
So yeah. So this isn't our start, just so
we're. Yeah, exactly. 20 minutes.
Yep. So why is squatting such a
foundational position? Squatting is a position of rest,
so when we're in the bottom of the squat, it is this.
Perfect reflection of muscle balance.
So when you've got great ankle mobility, knee mobility, hip
mobility, the muscles in the front of the thigh work just as
well. With muscles in the back of the
thigh, we're allowed to assume a position of rest when we have
imbalance, when there's dysfunction, when there's
restriction or tension. A squat is no longer a capable
thing. One of the best parts about a
squat is the more time we spend in this, the more in tune the
relationship with our body becomes.
So you're going to find that the muscles in the front and the
back can better communicate together.
It is it. It's a staple of health.
It's a staple of longevity. And you're going to hear, you
know, the Internet's in no short supply of people saying that
squatting is a part of longevity.
If we can develop the ability to get on and off the ground and be
comfortable at rest in the bottom of the squat, we're
probably going to have a much higher quality of life.
So it's definitely something to prioritize.
And I've heard that a lot of other cultures just do this very
naturally and normally even it like instead of sitting, it's
not unusual for people to just hang out in a squatted position,
you know, like eating a meal or drinking a beverage or
something. Yeah, Well, I'm sure even what I
just started off with, which is a squat as a position of rest,
you're going to have probably most of the audience and most
people are going to say no, that's no, because that's not my
experience of it. It's a position of extreme work
and discomfort. And that's usually what happens
in the West in the modern developed countries.
But then you start traveling abroad and you start seeing
people having conversations like this.
They eat meals like this, they work like this.
And we start finding that they're capable of resting in a
squat because they're just spending more time in it.
And it's only the people that don't spend time in a squat
position struggle with a squat position.
And it could almost be that simple, which is the more you do
it, the easier it gets. So interesting.
And there's also a debate on not necessarily being in a deep
squat like this, but when when you're squatting, I was taught
that you should push your knees out.
But now I know people are saying like, no, it's OK for the knees
to go forward over the toes. What's your opinion on that?
The knees over the toes or the restriction of knees over toes
came in a 1970 study from Michigan and these Michigan.
These Michigan researchers looked at knee pressure, and
what they found is that if the knees move forward over the
toes, pressure on the knees increase 28%.
So anybody with knee issues heard, oh, well, there's more
pressure on the knee, 28%. We don't want that.
And in the 70s, when you don't really have a lot of information
and you you latch on to this 28% increase knee pressure, you're
going to come to the conclusion that squatting is bad for your
knees. Fast forward to 2003,
researchers again wanted to take a look at that.
They did the same test and they found, Yep, that's still true.
When the knees move in front of the toes, knee pressure
increases 28%. But they did not look at the
hip, pelvis and the spine. And what these researchers
showed is that if you allow the knees to go in front of the
toes, knee pressure increases 28%, but hip and back pressure
reduces 1000 percent, 1000%. So when we look at the body and
these really narrow views of what does this do to 1 joint, we
try to isolate and we come up with all these, like, silly
rules. The feet should be straight, the
knee should be out. They shouldn't go over the toes.
But when we take a step back from the science and we look at
what is natural and what's fluid, what we're left with is,
yeah, OK, we should be able to squat with the feet out.
That's great. But we should also have the
ability to have our feet straight and our knees together.
And this should still be comfortable.
And it's only when we remove all of these rules of what movement
should and shouldn't be where we actually get to back to a
natural state. And you're going to find this
all the time. You see people and you ask them
to squat and it's like knees out, chest up, shoulders back,
chin down, brace the core. Do this.
We're trying to like out think movement.
And what about the people who are better squatters than
developed countries? They're not learned.
They don't have personal trainers, they're not learning
about the science and what's happening in the laboratories
with the bio mechanics and what joint should and should move.
They are moving fluidly and comfortably and intuitively.
So if we want to move more fluidly, we actually have to not
try to out think things and we have to put all the logic and
the thought to the side, get back to our breath and figure
out what is the easiest way to move.
You know, if you and I were in a dangerous situation, you
wouldn't think, OK, I've got to get to safety.
Shoulders back, glutes engaged, ABS fire.
Don't rotate the hips move the you wouldn't do this whole
exhaustive movement checklist. You would just move intuitively
to safety. But somewhere down the road,
with modern research and science and all these rules, we become
like really restricted and it's almost like disconnected us from
ourselves and our bodies. Yeah, I always think about that
phrase. I think it might be the title of
the book, Civilized Beyond Common Sense.
Like, like you said, we're creating all these rules for
things based on this research, but we're forgetting that
intuition that we all have about like, what feels right and what
doesn't. I want to dive into your story
because it's wild. You were a collegiate all
American swimmer and you held over 30 records in the state of
Colorado before you ended up breaking your back in a surfing
accident. And I listened to your first
podcast episode where you talk about your story.
It's really good listen. I felt like I was in it right
there with you. The craziest thing to me, the
thing that really stood out was that after you broke your back
in the ocean, you made it back to shore.
There was no one on shore. You were in excruciating pain
and you got in your car and drove 40 minutes home.
I think you slept that night and then went to the ER the the next
day. Why?
Why did you just not go straight to the ER?
Like things were popping. I mean, it sounded absolutely
like excruciating. Like I just curious like what
what personality trait in you do you think caused you to, to
just, Nope, I'm going to go home.
I'm not going to, I'm not going to get help for this.
Tell me you had childhood trauma without telling me you've had
childhood trauma. You know that.
That's what pain does. It just amplifies and reveals
everything. I learned at a young age to deal
with pain internally and silently.
I learned that my needs didn't really matter and I learned to
just keep it to myself. And I learned that the way I was
feeling and thinking was a burden in my environment.
So when I had this traumatic, back breaking, life changing
injury, my first gut instinct and reaction wasn't let's go be
vulnerable and ask people for help.
It was I need to be alone right now because that's how I did
everything. That's how I process stuff when
things got emotionally challenging or hard and I was
always fearful of like expressing things and not them
not being met the right way or being misinterpreted.
When you're shaped like that as a child, you learn to just go
inward into your cave when things get hard and when there's
stress, pressure and adversity or a back breaking pain or an
injury, you're probably going to default to what you know.
And what I know was not being vulnerable and reaching out and
calling for help. What I knew was to isolate and I
knew how to be by myself and so. It.
You know, it's not a far stretch that in a traumatic situation
that was a default mechanism that showed up.
Yeah, interesting. And you're also very driven, I
think. And so do you think though the
flip side of that was also also fueled you in your healing
journey to like I'm going to get once you kind of came out of
that like this mindset, I'm going to get better.
Obviously, you're thriving now. So do you think there's like a
flip side to that of it also allowed you once you kind of
came out of that slump to go all into your recovery and to
building this business is helping so many people recover
from pain also? Yeah, You know, I'll, I'll
explain it like this. If if you hold a cup of hot tea
and somebody bumps into you and that tea spills, why did the tea
spill? It over it overflowed, the cup
was too full and you were off balance.
Yeah, and somebody bumped into you, right?
Somebody else's fault. If you were holding water, the
water would have spelt. Yes.
If you were holding nothing, nothing would have spelt.
Life is going to bump you, and pain does that.
If you've ever experienced chronic pain or even an injury
that's been around for a while, could just be acute pain, you're
going to realize that that's life bumping you and it's going
to Rock You because it's uncomfortable and it hurts.
And it's really easy to love your body when it feels good.
It's really easy to have a good relationship with yourself when
you look good. It's really easy to be mindful
and present when life is very easy and the world is impressing
on you. But when you have something like
a traumatic injury and what's actually inside you is like
anger and frustration and resentment and betrayal and all
the things, you know, I'm talking like the shadow stuff,
the stuff that we try really not to show the world when pain
bumps you, which it will. It's just a matter of if and
it's a matter of when and how it's going to spill over
whatever's in your cup. And this was my journey, though
it started with a back breaking injury, the subsequent entire
decade was me coming back to myself and understanding what
that even meant. And that was really hard for me
because I remember what it was like being in a doctor's office
and seeing my broken back on an X-ray board.
I remember being able to see the mess physically.
I could point to the spot physically in my body where it
hurt. And all that's true.
I had all the physical evidence that things were wrong and the
structure was affected, but why it took so long to heal was
because of how I actually showed up and the internal dialogue and
the relationship with myself. How I sabotage myself when I
started to feel better and I stopped doing my exercises
because even though I didn't want to be in pain, I actually
didn't feel like I deserve to be out of it.
And even if things felt good, like when I, when my back
actually started to feel better and I started to understand what
it felt like to have no pain, I started becoming an ultra
marathon runner because I didn't know what to do without pain in
my life. You know, it's much like we're
in the countryside right now. This place is beautiful.
But if you're used to being in the city and the traffic sounds,
the people screaming, you know, chaos, and then you come out
here and it's quiet and it's calm.
That silence is almost uncomfortable, not because it's
bad, but because it's different and it's new.
And when you normalize discomfort and you normalize
pain and all of these sensations that you're used to, and then
all of a sudden you realize you can remove them, you start to
find different ways to recreate those.
At first it was like getting a lot of tattoos because I didn't
know how to navigate feeling good.
And then I ran out of real estate and I wasn't going to go
on the face you. Know I had to good choice.
I knew it. Thank you.
Thank. You very much.
I'm glad you stopped one of my better choices as a young man.
But then, you know, when I ran out of real estate, it's like,
OK, well, what other forms of pain can I go find?
And then I realized, yeah, running sucks.
Found it. Let's do that.
Yeah, let's. Just go do that so.
I'm starting to really feel this.
Yeah, Are you are you're. You're probably good.
It's talking. OK, does what does what I'm
feeling say something about like with the part of me that I that
maybe needs work because I feel it in my, it's like probably my
hamstrings and like my calves, like the in the backside of my
leg. On both legs, yes.
OK. I feel so tight.
So this is one of the ways that we have to learn how to work
with sensation. So notice how the brain Albert
Einstein once had this great example where he wrote 10
questions, 10 simple math questions on a board.
Nine of them were right. The 10th 1 was wrong and the
entire class only focused on the wrong thing.
We tend to hyper fixate on the discomfort so yes that's true.
I can see it. Yep.
Yes, you're fixated. It becomes loud.
It becomes a loop. Tell me something that feels
good right now. My my upper body feels pretty
good, yeah. My butt feels fine, yeah.
So when you're working with your body like this, all of those
things are true for me, too. The legs are talking, and that's
not the whole story. And understanding that you can
hold many stories at once that yeah, joints are talking, nerves
are waking up, things are getting tired.
And I'm so thankful that I can actually do this with everything
my body's been through. Thank you, ankles, for holding
up right now. Thank you lower back for being
able to sit through this. Smile all right, let's let's
change some things let's get my. Thanks.
I don't know if I would have let myself do that.
We'll get back into it, straightening out my leg right
now. Look, you just had a very real
experience. Now, the cool thing is, is you
just immediately got out of that.
When you're somebody who's in a body where that is the
background noise all day long, almost every day, anytime you
bend forward to pick up your kids or clean something up or
sit and work, when that noise is in the background.
Imagine how loud it gets and how the brain just starts hyper
fixating on it. Yeah.
And we almost become like tunnel vision.
I call it like hawk mode. You know, the way like a hawk
looks at something. It's so like, fierce and
intense. That's most people's
relationship with pain. Is to like resist it hyper
fixate. On it, yeah.
Of course. Yeah, and so begins the
formation of becoming chronic. Yeah, OK, so let's get into that
in regards to your story. So give us a glimpse into what
the next 5-10 years looked like for you after the accident.
It looked much like everybody else's journey who's struggling
with their body. What do you do?
You first start off with the doctors.
You get the drugs and the prescriptions.
You get the pain pills. You get the anti inflammatories,
the muscle relaxers, the whole chemical western concoction of
like how to manage pain and try to suppress it.
Yeah, that's, that's an interesting piece.
So you would you were seeing a like pain management expert tell
us what that experience was actually like.
So annoying. I thought pain management meant
we were going to like. Getting free from pain.
Like what? What are you going to show me to
go fix it? And it was just what
prescription makes sense for the pain.
And that's what it was. And I think that was my
breakdown. So for the first five years
after breaking my back, it was bouncing around from doctor to
doctor, PT, yoga, Cairo massage, like whatever anybody else has
access to. And I was even desperate enough
to go look online for like the gurus, what are like the people
doing the unconventional things. I met this guy in line who
swears, you know, he did like the hammer on the spine.
That's what it needed to be fixed, not.
Heard of that? Don't do it.
Literally hammering. Yeah, it's literally a chisel
and doing 1 vertebrae at a time to put them back in place, which
makes no sense. But I wasn't here for sense, I
was here for pain relief. Yeah, and pain hijacks your
senses really fast. So you start doing really
rational things like I did. And it wasn't until year 6 where
IA brand new pain management clinic opened up in Calabasas.
And I went to it and I was feeling hopeful. 6 years of this
thing, what's going on with my body?
Why aren't I getting better? And I remember leaving that
doctor's office with just a brand new prescription, more
drugs than anybody should be prescribed.
And like, that was it. That was their grand genius
plan, nothing else. There was no.
Switching up the prescription. Yeah, it was switching up.
It actually wasn't even switching it.
It was giving more increasing. It was just more narcotics and
I, I had this breakdown that, and it was a great breakdown.
It was a realization that nobody's going to care about
this more than I do. Nobody is going to come save me.
Like I've got to do it myself. And that's why I put myself back
through school and I, I just became a sponge of what the hell
is the body? How does it work and how do you
put it together and come back after a life changing entry like
this? And what did you discover?
Some really uncomfortable truths and it's a hard conversation to
have because if we don't have this conversation the right way,
it could be very invalidating for people.
By the time I got to throwing myself into modern education,
everything was about the body. The so as muscle, you have to
release this muscle. If you saw a foot person, all of
your back pain was coming from your feet.
If you saw a neurologist, everything's coming from your
nerves. If you saw a roll for hope,
Nope, it's your fascia. Everything else is fine, but
it's your fascia. Everybody was trying to pick
apart the body piece by piece and system by system, and
specialize in that system. Not in any wrong or malicious
way, but because that's how we're taught about the body.
Go back to like young elementary school.
We have the skeletal system, we've got the respiratory
system. We learn about things and parts
and pieces, but if you think about it, we all formed in the
womb as one complete system. Sounds about right for western
medicine. Something's going on with your
skin, you see a dermatologist. If it's your hormones, you see
an endocrinologist. And yeah, I think Western
medicine is just so quick to segment every part of the body
and not see it as a whole. Yeah, we've got a problem here
on our face. So let's go look for the expert
who's working on the face. And your knee jerk reaction
isn't? Well, let me look at the person
who's having the problem with the face.
What are their habits? What is their lifestyle?
What does their food look like? What does their sleep look like?
What environment are they putting themselves into?
And Western medicine's great. And this isn't a dog against
that, because if I get into a traumatic accident, I'm not
going to go to a holistic specialist.
I'm going to go to a triage specialist maybe.
Maybe not. Maybe I'll go on there.
Maybe you'll wait a week and then.
Go. Yeah, I'll probably right.
That's exactly what will happen. No, that's exactly what would
happen. I know better.
I know what I'm doing here. Let me put the pieces back
together. And so I started to see that I
had all the exercises or as much as I thought one could have.
I scoured the Internet and these educational companies and these
resources. I acquired credentials.
What are the physical tools to solve this problem?
And the reality was my fracture healed, was healed, spent six
years. What we know is tissue reliably
heals. If you cut your skin at heals.
If you break a bone at heals. I didn't realize that a broken
back could heal like that because initially you were.
The recommendation was that you should have surgery, which you
declined, but it ended up healing on its own.
Yeah, I guess I've always thought that like a broken back
is something that maybe you would need a back brace for or
yeah, surgery or something. But.
That's the treatment right now for it and some cases that's
rightfully so, especially if there's like a spinal cord.
And that's the whole that's to jump into.
Let's go fuse the area. Let's not put the spinal cord at
risk. Let's go give this person a
brace. Let's not have them be subjected
to anything that's unstable that could cause severe central
nervous system damage to the spinal cord.
So all of that makes sense and your body can heal, and it's
actually quite good at healing the problem, even if it started
off with structural like what mine did, I can point to the day
and the time that my back broke. I had all the physical evidence
in the world this was a physical problem.
Why the hell weren't the exercises working?
Why were the back pain specialists who are brilliant
people in this field, why was that not helping?
And where my education led me is what doesn't show up on Mr. is
which is your nervous system and how you think and how you feel,
how your brain interprets sensation.
What I didn't understand at the time and, and I want to be
really mindful here. If you would have told me
halfway through my journey here, hey, then the reason why you're
not healing is because of your relationship with yourself, I
would have flipped you off and I would said that's not true,
you're wrong. I remember being that defensive
guy because I had the evidence that that's what was true for me
and I couldn't have been more wrong.
And that's the hard pill that needed to be swallowed.
My brain got so good at rehearsing pain long after the
herniations healed, long after the fracture healed.
Even basic sensation was triggering a pain alarm.
And that's the case for a lot of people, right?
I mean, I think I've heard you say that for 25% of people, the
pain still remains even after the body structurally has
healed. So what's going on with that?
Here's what's objectively true. Everybody has a brain.
We do not feel pain in our body. It's our brain that interprets
and produces what pain means. So for example, like we don't
see with our eyes, we see with our brain.
You can have perfect functioning eyes, but if you have brain
damage, it affects your vision. We don't hear with our ears, we
hear with our brain. Again, same thing if we have
brain damage or if a brain misinterprets auditory signals.
We get really confused here. When you have a dysregulated
nervous system and you have an injurious event, like I did a
traumatic accident, you get really good at producing pain
responses in the brain. Here's what that means.
There was a study done in 2012, so we're talking like 1313 years
ago now. That's 15 years ago.
This study looked at people who just experienced back pain and
with an 85% accuracy they were able to determine not by looking
at the structure or the damage or the injury, who was going to
be in pain a year later. How?
By looking at the brain specifically 2 regions of the
brain, the medial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus
accumbens. These are areas of the brain
that deal with meaning, storytelling, threat, and
reward. So I'm talking about fear based
systems here. Is there a reward for pain?
What is your meaning with pain? And they found the more these
two regions of the brain talk together, the significantly the
higher the chance somebody was going to be in chronic pain and
not heal. Even if the injury healed, they
were still going to experience the injury the same.
Because we have to understand that our body is riddled with
nerves. Nerves that tell us if something
touches us. Nerves that tell us if there's
pressure, heat, cold, warmth, whatever it is right now, the
nerves are giving us a sensation that we're sitting on, on our
hips. These are all normal neutral
signals. But what happens when your brain
misinterprets those signals as bad and as harmful, as
dangerous? What happens when you feel
unsafe as a person? And remember that little teacup
analogy? You have fear, anger, and a lack
of safety just living inside of you because of what you've been
through. And now all of a sudden your
brain latches onto fear or it latches onto pain.
You are going to replicate that pain signal again and again and
rehearse it. And the more you rehearse it,
the more it happens. Now let me make that real for
somebody. If it hurts to bend forward, you
bend forward and it hurts. How many times do you think your
brain needs to experience that before it predicts bending
forward is going to hurt? Without you even bending
forward, your brain thinking about it is already producing
attention and a lack of safety, a fear response.
This is no different than Pavlov and his dogs when he was trying
to figure out what is a conditioned response.
And he'd ring a bell, he'd feed dogs food, and then the dogs
would salivate. He stopped feeding the dogs
food, kept ringing the bell, and the dogs would keep salivating.
So we know conditioned responses happen, and when you condition
and rehearse pain, it doesn't matter what the injury is.
It's actually not even about structural problems.
The brain rehearses fear, therefore it rehearses pain.
So you have to heal the nervous system essentially.
You have to heal the nervous system.
It's the driver, though it might not have started the fire.
It's what's keeping it alive, though.
Maybe there's an autoimmune issue.
Maybe there is an actual traumatic structural injury or
an accident. Maybe there was something
congenital that you're born with.
That all could be true. But the driver of the pain is
and will always be the nervous system and what we now know with
modern science. There was a brilliant study done
in 2015. They did Mr. IS on 3110 people,
which I think is a pretty significant control group.
They found that 64% of these people without pain had the same
Mr. is as the people who have pain.
This disease, herniations, stenosis, spondee, all of these
things that we're told this is, Yep, This is why your back
hurts. You've got spondee, you've got
degenerative disc disease, you've got this going on with
the discs. All of that is present in people
without pain. So objectively, we know
structure alone is not the driving cause of pain.
It's the nervous system, and it's the brain's meaning that it
puts on pain. So once you discovered that,
what did you do to to heal your nervous system?
Well, I first denied the hell out of me.
I resisted every bit of that truth because my entire formal
education was, you know, exercise Physiology from
Stanford School Medicine. It was posture alignment therapy
through Augusta University. Everything in my world was bio
mechanics. And I just had to break down
that entire model and ditch it and move into the nervous
system. Yeah, because you were faced
with this reality of like, seeing that, OK, structurally
everything's good, but but I still have this pain.
So it's like wrestling with that and probably.
Yeah, just having to be confronted with the fact that
there's more to the story here. Yeah, and there I resisted the
hell out of it. And there were two moments, and
I'll never forget these moments where that actually became a
truth for me and I actually experienced what they're talking
about South. One of my rehab exercises, which
is probably most people's, is doing bridges right.
Laying on the ground, lifting your hips up and down.
For a guy with my history and back story, they were a
nightmare. It literally passed all those
muscles. I felt this tug of war.
Bridges hurt every time I did them.
And I'll never forget it. It was a Saturday morning early
in the morning, Try to get my PT done so I can try and be like a
present available father find these these dreaded bridges came
up and I'm doing them and like I'm pain wincing.
This movement sucked. And then my son comes in the
room. He was probably like four or
five at the time. And he tells me this little joke
that wasn't even like funny, but the way he said it, it was so
hilarious to me in the moment. And I just started cracking up
while doing these bridges. And after laughing with him,
he's giggling. He's got those like little kid
belly laughs that just it makes me laugh harder.
And so we were caught in this like laughter, hysterical loop.
And then all of a sudden, like, wait a second, I'm doing my
bridges and like, they don't hurt.
What is going on here? And I panicked and I thought it
was a breakthrough. What's happening?
And then the moment my attention shifted back to my movement, the
pain came right back. And so is this weird like little
blip of why did what I was focusing on entirely change my
relationship with something that was very predictable?
This movement sucked for me. I'm thinking of childbirth as
you're saying this. Tell me more because there was a
moment with my, my, my middle child, I was in labor and our
midwife is like trying to figure out how to make coffee.
OK? So that was her biggest concern.
I was literally like, I was almost ready to push, OK.
And pushing takes a while for me.
So but I was there, you know, and she's like wanting her cup
of coffee. We're at we're at home.
I've done home births. And so she's like, I'm in the
tub almost ready to push. My husband's there.
She's like going up to my husband.
Like, hey, like, the coffee maker is not working.
I'm doing this and this and it's not making coffee.
And he's like trying to explain it to her.
And so she goes downstairs, comes back up, like, yeah, it
didn't work. And I'm like, it, it sounds like
a nightmare maybe to some people, but honestly, it like
took me out of the moment. And I'm like, this is great.
We're. This is so casual.
Like everyone's just hanging out.
She's worried about her coffee. This is no big deal.
I can do this. It totally, like, took me out of
the pain that I was feeling in that moment.
So I just thought of that when you said that, like I, yeah,
having having like an outside experience that kind of mentally
causes you to feel removed from that source of pain for a
moment. It can be really powerful.
And you just did, maybe not at the time with the clinical
definition of it. You did a somatic tracking
experience. You showed your brain that there
is more to the story of what you're physically feeling then
you're paying attention to. And by shifting your field of
vision, by shifting your attention, you're able to place
attention differently in your brain and body, which then
allows you to come back to it a little different.
How do you do that if you're not forced to do that like you, like
your son came up to you, You know, my midwife was making the
coffee. It's like, how do you, how does
one just muster? I mean, I'm sure it's not like
mustering up the, you know, the effort to take yourself out of
it. Like how does that work if you
aren't met with that distraction?
Yeah. So the distraction can show you
that it's possible, but there is an actual process that you can
do to actually create that every single time.
And that's the gift of pain. The sensation being there is the
reminder to do a somatic experience, not in the force
way. Every time I feel pain, I've got
to go do this. That puts more pressure and
judgement on the brain. But it's in a way of #1 when you
feel a sensation come in is actually just observing that,
not reacting to it, not going with it, but taking this deep
breath. Oh yeah, there's sensation.
Oh yeah, the back is talking to me.
That's what's showing up for me. Almost seeing it as information,
collecting the information and taking inventory of it rather
than letting yourself be immersed in it.
Yeah, because most people are going to find that there is no
observation of the sensation. It's a sensation that is
followed by an immediate reaction, and that reaction
amplifies the sensation. Oh God, this means I'm broken,
I'm ruined. I knew I was doing something
wrong. I'll never get better.
I'm getting old, I'm failing, I hate my body.
The list goes on. And this goes back to that
study, right? How we attach meaning to pain
determines who's going to be stuck in this loop.
So step one is being able to actually identify the loop.
There's that sensation again. What is the story that shows up?
For me, it was my back's broken. Bridges were proof that I was
broken. My son showed me that there is
possibility that maybe I'm not broken because I could do this.
So step one is identify the sensation, identify the loop.
What do I feel and what is the story that shows up?
Step 2 is being able to interpret that sensation.
Is that story true? Is that real?
For me, my interpreting the signal?
Remember when your brain misinterprets things, that's
where chronic pain can really have its breeding ground.
It's well, my back isn't broken. It's no longer broken.
It once was, but it now it's not.
I'm not in any danger here. I've got a roof over my head.
I've got food in my fridge. I've got a loving son next to
me. I am safe right now in this
moment. And then Step 3, which is invite
safety back in. And maybe it's with a breath,
maybe it's with calm reassurance that I'm allowed to feel this.
And that doesn't mean I'm not OK.
I'm allowed to feel this and I allow it here.
There are all of these ways in working with sensation.
The problem is, is nobody's born with these.
It is a very human thing to feel something uncomfortable and
resist it. And the challenge is, is we
treat pain like how we would treat nobody.
We feel bad, We meet ourselves with criticism, judgement, a lot
of force, a lot of resistance, a lot of negativity.
But we wouldn't meet like a loved one who's in pain like
that. And that's where the
interrelationship shows up. How you meet sensation
determines what experience you're going to have with it.
And I like most people had 0 framework other than a big
middle finger. And other than I hate this it
pain felt like betrayal. Every time I felt pain I thought
about this like young strapping athlete and now I can't even
like put shoes on. I made pain mean so much that I
was not just feeling sensation, I was feeling my whole identity
being changed. No wonder why it wasn't
changing. No wonder why there was no
exercise in the world that was going to change that for me.
But I learned how to use exercise as the stimulus to
retrain safety and to provide reassurance.
And from that moment on, the the next 13 something years were
about how do you work with sensation when it shows up?
I give people exercises and they're going to feel a lot like
we would have, like we just felt a lot in a squat.
And then what is the story and how do we work with that to
change the nervous system and the capacity of the body to
heal? So it's, it's bringing the mind
and the body together in the exercises, but doing them with
the right mindset and kind of the process that you mentioned.
And and that's the key to getting better.
Yeah, it's, it's always been the key because the body can heal.
There's no like healer out there.
We can biohack certain ways and inject.
We can do things to maybe facilitate healing, but your
body's phenomenal at healing. The question is, is are you
going to get in your own way and make this 10 times harder and
more intense than it needs to be?
And what if pain was really the calling to form a better
relationship with our self? And if we can start to reframe
pain and start to question it, maybe with a little bit of
curiosity, it doesn't become this thing that makes us hard
and tense and that we fight. It becomes a sting that we
almost like, what are you here to show me?
What am I missing? You're really smart body.
You are brilliant. Like, what?
Do you know that? I don't know.
Teach me. Yeah.
And that's good instinct we can feel around with people who
maybe aren't the right people to be around.
Like it's our body talking to us, but we vilify.
Pain is the bad guy. It's just a messenger.
Yeah, it's information. That's all it is.
You also talk about focusing on the basics over specifics, which
I think is very counterintuitive and also probably goes a lot
against what a lot of traditional physical therapy
would have us believe, that if our knee hurts, we need to do
exercises that read to rehabilitate the knee versus it
may be another part of the body that's broken, but it's showing
up in a totally different area. Yeah, all the time.
And you know, I always say people to train the basics
before specifics for that exact reason.
Yeah, I know your knee hurts. I know your back hurts.
I know you have a specific thing that you're working through, and
that specific thing naturally makes you look for a specific
solution. And so begins a looking for the
proverbial needle in a haystack. If we can take a step back and
ask basic questions. How do both ankles work?
Do both knees bend? How did the hips rotate and flex
and extend? What kind of motion does the
pelvis have have? How does the spine move?
We're talking basic movement patterns.
Can you bend, squat, twist. Let's restore the basics of
human movement. And in so many cases, let's
watch how those little specific problems actually clear
themselves up because a specific problem you're needing just wake
up one day and say, hey, I'm just going to stop working.
Let's go bone on bone now. It's the consequence.
It's the outcome of all of the basics for days, weeks, months
and years not stacking up to work together.
Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah.
Why is REST not necessarily the best prescription for pain?
It depends on where you're at in the injury stage.
When I just broke my back and crushed it against the rock,
rest was pretty important. That's really useful.
Rest can be a ally in calming down your system, but that's
such a short period of rest actually being useful.
What does movement do? Movements medicine.
And when I say that, I mean every time we move, we are
calling in blood, oxygen and nutrients into the areas that
we're moving. Every time we move, we are
flushing out metabolic waste products like lactic acid and
other things that just happen when the cells naturally turn
over. Movement is this beautiful
flushing mechanism. And when we choose to not move,
we never actually get to get the areas, the nutrients and the
oxygen in the blood that they need.
And so all of a sudden, and even the doctor that came out with
the rice method, which was rest, ice compress and elevate has
since recanted. This is not really good
information. Wow, I was going to ask you
about icing next. It actually slows down the
healing process. Is there any circumstance in
which someone should ice an injury?
It can be great for pain relief, you know, it can be soothing.
And we're not vilifying ice. It shouldn't be the strategy.
Sometimes after I go on my long runs, ice just feels great on my
feet and ankles to revitalize sensation with so much pavement
pounding. But at the end of the day, rest
and ice should not be the strategy.
They can be little friends that you make along the road.
Most people will rest their way into the next injury because of
the moment and and this is where we could open up a whole
different can of worms. If you feel pain and you meet it
with rest, you're showing your body that pain is bad and
therefore we should no longer move.
You're letting it boss you around.
You're letting it boss you around and the moment your brain
figures out pain equals rest, that becomes the underlying
strategy. And just like our body can adapt
and get stronger when we work out.
If you've ever been in shape and then have taken a week or two
off, you know the opposite is also true.
We lose it quickly. That deconditioning happens when
we rest. So if we've got this injured
body, it's weak, it's got muscle balances, it already has a hard
time moving, and we are now taking movement out of the
picture. What is happening to the tissue?
And this is how a short term acute issue can become long term
chronic. Because we're literally resting
our way into chronic pain. We get weaker.
The weaker we get, the more we fear movement.
And rightfully so, because the more load and stress movement
creates in our body, the more pain we feel.
And so we all start to hop on this hamster wheel of rest is
the only thing I can do now, and movement is scary as hell.
I've noticed that I've never had thankfully a serious injury, but
I've twisted my ankle plenty of times and I've noticed that when
I've rested afterwards it doesn't seem to heal as well.
Like if I, if I do it and then I'm like resting and then go to
sleep and then I wake up the next morning and it's, it's
killing me. Whereas if I just kind of do
gentle walking after I like twist my ankle, it kind of just
goes away. Yeah, The new model is how can
we get movement as quick as possible, not to be negligent or
rush into it, but how do we get these tissues to actually become
alive again? And that is always about force
and putting load into them. That's what heals the body.
I'm curious as someone who is so well versed in Physiology and
anatomy and just physically like physical structure stuff.
So like I said, I've never had a serious injury.
The most pain I've experienced has been during childbirth.
Nobody in my audience is going to relate to that at all, and I
love that for you. That's great.
I'm very proud. I don't know why.
I mean, I have other issues, but like I've, I feel like I've
always been pretty agile, but I'm curious if you were to
assess me, are you noticing anything that's like, I don't
know, is my are my shoulders imbalanced?
There's like when I was squatting, Did you notice
anything of like, oh, that's, that's not quite right, What do
you see? We, I could go pull up a
textbook right now and we could go find 100 things to go change,
but that doesn't mean they need to change.
Because what I notice above Physiology, above form and
function is you seem to have a very healthy, well balanced
relationship with yourself. You seem to be very grounded and
very present, which means anything that's slightly off is
not going to get amplified into a full blown cataclysmic, you
know, problem that's going to sideline you.
Even you hearing you talk earlier before podcast started
about your experience of childbirth and I asked you like,
were you the outlier in that? Because it sounds like healthy,
like it sounds normal and you were surrounded by a really good
community. All of these things so little
people are experiencing. So the moment the body shifts
and the weight moves over to the right side, it becomes like
amplified and problematic. And all of a sudden all of these
like weird stories, my right side's the bad side, left side's
a good one. These stories just like take
off. And that's more of the problem
to fix than the bio mechanics themselves.
You know, the other thing I want to add to that is when people
first come to me for help, it's they, the MRI's on the table,
assess this, assess that. First thing I'm assessing is how
comfortable you are in your body.
Can you make eye contact? Is it hard to find you?
Are you here with me right now or are we really shifting,
having a very difficult time, like connecting?
That's one of the biggest things that reveals what your fit, what
is actually happening underneath the hood right now?
What is going on in your Physiology aside from hip
mechanics or pelvic tilt in motion, aside from lower back
rhythm? Yeah, that stuff's important.
But if you're very shifty and scattered, again, I could give
you the most precise mobility drill to address your core
compensation or dysfunction. And none of it matters if you're
not here with me. And if all you're doing is
trying to numb, escape, suppress, and avoid sensation.
You suppress emotions. I don't, I don't know what
exercise I can give you. I can try to meet you physically
and then over time bring you back to like the real center of
the problem. But that's why it's more than
just objective mechanics. And that's the biggest thing
that's changed my practice. If you would have met me 10
years ago, I wouldn't have gotten to know you as a person.
Didn't matter. Just send me your posture
photos, send me your squat. I'll tell you exactly what to go
do. And for about half of the
people, it was great. For the other half of the
people, it didn't work. And for years I didn't
understand why are only half of humans dealing with the laws of
physics, but the other ones are like, what it what is the
variable that makes somebody come here and have profound
change and somebody with the same injury come here and see no
change? And it's this, and it's what's
going on up here. That's everything.
Makes so much sense, but it's wild like 50%, those are not
very good odds. But I'm just thinking most
people who are in pain seeing, you know, whatever physical
therapist is covered by insurance, like they're not
factoring all of that in. What about for those for those
the few of us who are not like living in any sort of chronic
pain, but also just want to optimize mobility for longevity
and to hopefully avoid dealing with that in the future.
Why is this important to put into practice or, or is it
important to put all of this stuff into practice now so that
we don't have to deal with any kind of pain in the future or
minimize pain in the future? What we're talking about here is
quality of life. Just because there isn't a
problem, that doesn't mean one can show up.
So This is why pain should not be the end all be all compass
that people use. If I'm in pain, I've got a
problem. If I'm not in pain, that means I
don't have a problem. Flies are everywhere right now.
If you're pain free, if you've got this great relationship with
your body, great. Let's go figure out how to use
this vessel. Let's figure out how to train it
in a sustainable way so you can be this person in your 30s,
forties, fifties, 60s and beyond.
It's really a matter of how do we want to age, what kind of
level of activity that we want to hold on to, and more
importantly, what is the quality of life that we want to
experience? How many things do we want to be
capable of saying yes to? And the challenges is you're the
only person who can make that decision.
Nobody can try to scare you into that.
If you don't do this, then this is going to happen.
Fear mongering doesn't work. This is really about like you
getting honest with yourself and understanding you've got one
experience of life. What do you want that experience
to be? How long do you want to
experience being in this like physical vibrant body?
And then can we start to say yes preemptively to make that
happen? Yeah, I I want that.
I want to be playing with my great grandkids one day.
And that's certainly not the case for most people in America.
But I know in a lot of other cultures, people age and they
continue to be, they continue to add value to society rather than
kind of being a burden. And I think that's also about
how we treat our elders and, and all of that factors in.
But yeah, I know that hip injuries from falls, like once
someone once that happens to someone there, it impacts their
lifespan significantly. I mean, a lot of people just
really go downhill after. That yeah.
And you know, the, the sometimes hard conversation.
And again, this isn't out of of fear.
This is like, let's just get really practical about it.
An arthritic hip in your 50s starts when you're 30.
You know, these things don't just all of a sudden you have
it. It's all about the habits and
the behaviors and how you take care of yourself now determines
what kind of vessel you're going to have as you age.
And so if your goal is to be present for your grandkids, not
just sitting in a chair rocking back and forth, but outrunning
your kids as parents and showing them how to do it, and you're
like literally handing them the baton, then the question is how
can we start taking care of the self now to be able to do that
long term? And that means we probably make
a couple shifts. It's less about maybe what
fitness was in our younger athletic days of proving and
it's more about sustainability. How can I do what I'm doing
today to make sure I can do it again tomorrow and the next
week, so on and so forth. And we're really logical.
There's no finish line. We're trying to rush to.
We're not trying to hit the £300 squat club anytime soon.
We're just trying to take care of this body as we age
gracefully. Are there certain movements or
positions that people should really start to hone in on and
get comfortable in if they want to optimize their Physiology for
longevity? Yeah.
And it's actually, if we want to talk about optimizing Physiology
and longevity, we actually and movement, we've got to have a
conversation on the flip side of that coin, which is no movement.
How can we put the body into a position of rest?
So what I mean specifically is laying on your back with both
legs over a couch or a chair. Hips and knees are a 90°.
Probably could have had the whole podcast like that would
have been a way more comfortable squat.
I'm. Going to get back into it, Squat
I'll. Join you.
Can we bring ourselves down to a position of rest?
And can we tap back into our breath?
I'm talking about the downstate, that parasympathetic nervous
system, the part of you that is responsible for releasing
tension and relaxing your body, reducing muscle imbalances.
The part of you that you can get into after a fight with a loved
one or a really hard work day, or when you feel like you're
entering survival mode. How can we actually let go of
that tension? And if we want to move better,
it starts by actually getting good at a lack of movement, and
we actually find ourselves in stillness.
So then you can do any number of exercises burpees for seniors,
which is literally lying in a face down position, pushing
yourself up to the knees and standing back up then getting
back down. Doing simple movements like that
are more available because we're entering it from a relaxed
state. Not this had a bad day at work
how to fight with a partner. Let me go take this out on my
body. That's not longevity.
It's less about the exercise itself, and I think that's what
most people expect from me. Go do this and go do this and go
do that. It's not what we do, it's how we
do it. That's what determines if we're
going to be doing it for long at all.
So that position of of being on your back and legs up bent over
like a a couch? Or what about legs straight up
on the wall? I hear a lot about that.
You can do legs straight up the wall, so that definitely has
sensation and stimulus to it. If you've got tight hips, that's
a great one. If your hamstrings were a little
overactive in the squat, you probably spending time with your
legs up the wall. It's great.
It's inversion. It puts your blood flowing
downstream, which is great. A lot of benefits.
I teach that exercise in my program and not all time spent
with your body is about going and doing and changing.
It's also about what's checking in and what's currently going
on. And we're missing that piece.
And that's why regardless of your sex and your age or
whatever condition you have, the very first step in my program is
can we bring this very overactive, high stressed out
body into a, into a downstate? Can we actually down regulate
the nervous system? Because if I start throwing
exercises at you, you're going to do all of the exercises with
the problems that you're wanting to change.
If you've got a hip disparity, one hip stronger than the other,
I could give you a longevity exercise and you go crank the
hell out of squats. Are you not just continuing to
use that overactive hip while the other hip just atrophies and
gets weaker? This is why it all comes down to
can we first regulate the nervous system?
Let's do the work on the ground so when it comes time for a
squat, you've got both sides of your body showing up.
That's longevity work. It's not what you do, it's how
you're. Doing it?
How bad is sitting for humans? I think it's fantastic, really.
I'm going to take a different approach now, the approach I
wish I was the pioneer in this. I'm going to take a page from
Professor Daniel Lieberman. He is a Harvard professor in
evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology and he has a
brilliant stance on this. Sitting is the new smoking.
If you are a Westerner and you go off of Western information,
most of our understanding about the body comes from a very small
percentage of the actual world population.
We're talking 1 to 3% is actually a civilized modern
culture. And that's what we're basing all
of our information. That's where all of our studies
come from. If you want to understand the
human body, we have to take a step outside of Western culture
and look worldwide. How have all of these different
cultures and civilizations evolved to move?
And what we're going to find is that even in the most primitive
hunter and gatherer tribes, they have significant periods of rest
to conserve caloric expenditure. It is.
It's evolutionary to be able to rest for long periods of time.
Where we get in hot water is the difference between some of these
hunter and gatherer tribes. They have more vigorous spurts
of activity, which makes them much healthier, whereas we tend
to not really throttle our heart rate, right?
They might have to go into sprints.
They might have to do very heavy vigorous work, whereas that
tends to be missing from most modern developed countries,
right? We DoorDash to get our food.
We have people grocery shop for us, whatever it is we drive to
the grocery store. We don't really move that much
outside of our sedentary life. So it's not that sitting is
dangerous. It's actually we're hardwired to
sit. That's where our body can
actually repair and rest and heal tissues.
If we're always on the go, that creates other metabolic issues.
So sitting is crucial. The topic that we've got to talk
about is are there different ways to sit that are better?
That's what I was going to ask you.
OK, great. So this is a this is a fantastic
conversation. Jonathan Gordon, who is another
famous paleoanthropologist, he studies cultures and
civilizations all over the world and he studied and found over
100 different sitting postures in Cultures without chairs. 100.
I study movement for a living. I don't think I could tell you
100 different ways to sit because when you remove the
chair like we've done, not only are we sitting in a squat, but
we might shift a little bit or we might move to this now, 1
hips inflection, 1 knees in a little bit more flexion as well.
We're shifting the work around and that's what these tribes
have that beats our chairs is by not having a chair to sit in,
those people are being exposed to more variations of movement.
Therefore, the more shapes you can make when you're moving or
when you're sitting when you're at rest, the more the easier it
is to get in and out of shapes when it comes time to move.
Yeah, and even if they are sitting on like a rock or a log,
it's like they're not all totally uniform.
So there's still some shifting that's taking place.
Everything's different. Every log, every rock might be a
little different, and it might be sit here for a couple
minutes, stand up and go sit somewhere else.
So the total. Time spent sitting and resting
is almost the same as Western civilizations.
It's the vigorous activity that's different and it's the
amount of movement when we sit it's.
How we're sitting. It's how we're sitting.
So that's a fascinating distinction.
I'm just thinking about our, our world and how our culture, our
civilization is built on traditional chair sitting like
in cars, in flights, in the office.
What can people do for those unavoidable times where we are,
where we have to sit for a long time?
You've told me you drove 3 1/2 hours here this morning sitting
in a car. So is there anything we can do
to optimize our movement for for those times where we have to sit
in like a traditional chair seated type of position?
There's a. There's two main ways to look at
this. It might sound like a little bit
of an offshoot, but if you think about it like therapy, the point
of therapy isn't to remove stress from your life.
The point of therapy is to get better.
Dealing with whatever stress is in your life, make you more
competent and equipped, and give you tools.
It's the same thing with sitting.
Your fitness routines, your mobility work, the strength, all
of the stuff you're doing outside of sitting should better
prepare you to be able to sit because sitting is unavoidable.
It's a modern world and there's nobody that's going to be able
to just get up every 5 minutes at their desk and do exercises
when you're in a corporate environment or you've got to
like make money for a living, you know, So we have to get
really practical that sitting is unavoidable, just much like,
much like stress is unavoidable. It's about can we prepare a body
to deal with the stress of sitting?
And when I say shut, you want to know he's coming in.
You want to sit with us, buddy? You're still checking me out.
This is our guard dog Dog. Yeah, he deserves to be here.
You want to have a seat? He really likes you.
He doesn't usually come around this much during podcast.
So what I was saying is, you know, if you cannot get out of
sitting, then it's about how can we prepare a body better outside
of sitting? That just comes with strength
work. It comes with mobility work, so
that way work and force and load is evenly distributed with the
body, so it's not just lower back that's holding you upright.
You feel a little bit more general support as you're
sitting. If you do have the option, then
it's just about injecting some motion into your day.
When I started this work, I used to dedicate one hour of mobility
a day to my body and that was a really big commitment and that
was a great step one as I've. Mastered movement and learned
what really needs to happen. I now don't have an hour of
dedicated motion. It's like micro dosing motion
all day long. It's maybe getting up and doing
this simple movement here. Maybe sitting down.
It's doing some hip exercises. Maybe I'll grab a yoga block and
put it between my knees and just squeeze both knees together to
get the hip muscles active. Maybe I'll put a strap around my
legs in the middle of a long work meeting and press outward
against the strap to remind my back that I also have my hips
here to support me. So there's these little micro
things. You can even see me cooking in
the kitchen and I'll cook and I'll stir something and then
I'll go into like a simple little hold or a stretch,
something to remind my body that's capable of moving.
And I noticed when I shifted from this one hour of dedicated
motion and they're just trying to trickle it more throughout
the day, my body felt more capable and better.
I love that approach and it's like what kids do naturally, you
know, they're always fidgeting, like always, always moving
around. And I think that's so much
healthier than just living a sedentary lifestyle, but getting
in like 1/2 hour, hour of a heavy workout in and then going
back to being sedentary. Yeah, it's it's heroic bursts
and one of the big frontiers that I've got across with
everybody who comes to me for help.
Step one is learning the exercises.
That's great. It's helpful, but what about the
other 23 hours of the day? What are we doing in those other
23 hours that's winding up the problem that we're here to
change. And when you look at a kid and
you see they don't have expensive coaches, they don't
have really intensive training, They just are.
They're intuitive. They're intuitive.
They're constantly just figuring out what works and what doesn't
work. There's a sense of play that
comes with movement, which is why it doesn't feel like a chore
for them. Yeah, and they stretch.
I remember like I would wake up and just like, naturally, just
like, like stretch. Like we don't even do that
anymore. I try to remind myself to do
that. When my dog does it, I'm like,
OK, you're right, I probably should.
She stretches all the time. It's so natural.
And that's what we we've got to get back to this, this natural
sense. But maybe at the start, yeah,
let's put some some guardrails on it.
Let's come up with a dedicated routine, let's get you in the
habit, and then let's start to expand and just start to move
our bodies more. I've become really averse to
traditional sitting. So when I'm driving, like people
always make fun of me. But like I had this legs like up
like this legs on the gas and one legs like either I'm sitting
like it's across my knee or it's like up and kind of positioned
with my foot on on the seat. But I just feel like getting my
legs up and putting them in different positions as much as I
can when I'm either driving or on a flight seems to help a lot
too. It's just movement, That's all
it is. And I think we want movement to
be complicated, like some golden answer of this guy's going to
tell me this one. Yeah, OK.
Doug. Doug the dog's back man.
He really likes you. This doesn't ever happen.
Maybe because we're on his level?
We understand each other. Rich, our producer, is over
there with some treats. Some steak seems to be working.
There we go. Yeah.
And you know, I think people are expecting, like a really
complicated answer for me, and just moving more is the answer.
Like we if you want to get better at squats, it's not about
finding some random weird exercise that you've never done,
which is then going to love the squat.
It's let's practice squats, let's check a few emails in a
squat, let's go grab a really low stool and spend time
watching our favorite show on that stool.
And the more exposure that we can get in these positions,
we're going to find the easier it gets.
Now, if you're being told, hey, just move more, the very first
thought most people have is I don't know how.
And that's the work. That's that gap we need to
cross, because what we're really talking about here is a
disconnection event of intuitive movement.
We no longer trust what we feel. We're being told.
Sit like this. Nope, Sit like that.
Squat like this. No, this is bad for you.
Don't do. There's so much fear and so much
chaos when it comes to movement that we've almost locked herself
out of our body because we don't understand pain.
Western medicine makes pain the bad guy.
So if you fear it, I cannot tell you how many people who have
thrown significant numbers at me to have me watch them move
because they don't trust their body.
And that, at the heart of it, is what we need to address.
Why do you no longer trust sensation?
Because it doesn't feel safe in your body.
It no longer feels like home. So no matter what movement we
do, that's what we have to address.
And what I love giving people is movements that start to feel
like home again, so they can start to tap this intuitive
playfulness. That's what's missing, yeah.
Do you own furniture in your home?
Yeah, I do, and I use it often, yeah.
There's some people that are even anti furniture.
Yeah, some people are anti furniture and I'm not one of
those. I enjoy a good chair, you know,
It doesn't need to be dogmatic, no pun intended, but practicing
and playful. Sometimes I don't want to sit on
the ground, sometimes I don't want to sit in a squat.
Sometimes I want to lay on my bed with my girlfriend and watch
a show or connect whatever it is we're doing.
You should be allowed that. And I think, you know, again,
and maybe we don't have to go down this road, but it's it's
all about like how it's being preached.
You're allowed to sit for hours a day.
Oh, we got two guys. Thanks for coming today.
Oh my. Gosh.
Thanks. You know, like you're, you're
allowed to sit for 12 hours and that doesn't mean you have to be
in pain. That doesn't mean you should be
in pain. You're allowed to go for long
car drives, You're allowed to take days off of your movement.
You know, your mobility routine. All of these things are allowed.
But if your relationship with the stuff is sitting is bad,
what kind of experience do you think you're going to have at
the office if you're being told sitting is the cause of your
problems? Whether that's true or not,
which we can't objectively say, what is your experience that
you're going to have with sitting?
It's not going to be great and it's going to further put you in
stress when you're already stressed out for work.
Weighted vest walking is all the rage right now.
What's your take on that? I love it.
I love it too. I was hoping you would say that
because I'm such a fan and I have noticed such a big
difference personally doing it. I had AI had a buddy Thomas de
Lauer. He, he sent me a message
probably 3 or 4 weeks before this event.
He won the lottery in getting tickets to go Summit, Mount
Whitney and so. Fun.
I did that in college. It was incredible.
I've never done that before and he hits me up a couple weeks
before. I wasn't originally invited to
go, but somebody dropped out, so I was a great backup and I
realized, am I in Whitney shape? Yeah.
And also not only Whitney shape, but like Thomas Lauer Whitney
shape, he's probably going to want to run up this and run down
it. So how do I get in shape really
fast for it? They got a weighted vest, put 60
lbs in it. Wow.
And that made it neck. I had to do a lot of neck stuff
that was way too much load, way too fast, too quick.
But what I learned is that a three hour hike felt like 6 to
10 hours and it rapidly increased the intensity, which
meant that I got ready in like 3 weeks for something that
probably should have taken a few months to get ready for.
Wow, did. You do it in one day.
We did it in one day. We literally powered up it and
tried to run down it. It was a phenomenal experience.
You. Ran down.
Yeah, well. We tried to, so as soon as we
got to the top, we summited. We took our photos as proof we
made it and then we're feeling like spriteful and youthful and
like, let's just send this down. Then we were basically fasted.
He had a couple beef patties on him.
Hey, guys. Oh my gosh, this is amazing.
Thanks for joining us today. And then we literally were like,
you know what, let's do it. Let's bomb down and.
Did it hurt your knees? It didn't hurt my knees, but
probably about half a mile into it we forgot we were at
altitude. Some like 14 I think it's.
Like 14,000 something, yeah. 14,500 feet and mistakes were
made. So we're like, all right, we
don't have to be heroes here. We did it.
Now it should actually enjoy the downhill.
So it was a great experience, but rocking was a huge, powerful
thing. I felt it got me in better shape
than running did because it was more work, more strength with
less impact. So I'm I'm a huge fan of it.
I have nothing but great things to say about it.
Cool. OK.
I'm so glad I asked you about the knees because yeah, like I
said, I did Mount Whitney in college and also Mount
Kilimanjaro. And climbing or, you know, going
up the mountain was never the hardest part for me.
It was coming down because I'm not a, I'm not someone that
deals with knee pain, but in the both of those cases, my knees
were were killing me by the end of it.
And I don't know if that would be different now.
I wasn't eating a clean diet. There was probably more
inflammation, but what do you think was to blame for that?
You know, it's funny, when I first started becoming an ultra
marathon runner, I chose a hell of a course to do it.
It was a 50 mile route in the old Cascadia mountain range.
It was 16,000 vertical feet. So this wasn't just 50 miles.
This was 50 miles up and down some serious mountains.
And so my concern was like the getting up front because I did
not have the strength and endurance.
I hadn't even ran a marathon at that point.
I just decided to go for 50. I ended up hiring a a coach. 6
Stream podcasting right here. Yeah, yeah.
We're just getting into it. I hired a coach, Zach better,
who's the world record holder in the 100 mile race.
Like, who better to teach me how to solve an endurance issue than
literally the world's fastest man over 100 miles?
And I remember the very first call I had with him, I'm like,
all right, man, what's the strategy?
How do we do this? And he said, your problem's not
going to be the uphill, it's the downhill.
I'm like, no, I just float downhill.
That's like gravity working with me.
He's like, no, the amount of control it takes to decelerate
your mass moving down will burn your quads in a way no uphill
ever will. And so his main goal with
training was for me to walk uphill and run downhill.
So I had to find the highest mountains I could and just train
the downhill part because that was going to be.
He was convinced the determining factor of if I was going to
finish or not was if I had downhill mechanics.
Yeah. That's what makes people tap.
Yeah. Very underrated.
Yeah, if you're lacking the control and the stability to
slowly move down, it's it's going to be challenge for sure.
What's the most overrated fix for chronic pain?
I'm I'm cycling through every hack that has ever come across.
Probably a lot. I teach stretching so and be
really mindful how I say this. There is a use for stretching,
but it should not be the strategy.
Stretching out tissue is great, it feels good.
It has very measurable down regulatory effects.
So if tissues tight, intense, overactive, you stretching it
can help relax. But everybody's being told to
stretch what's tight. We have to understand that
what's tight is coming from the brain.
If you were to knock somebody out with general anesthesia, you
would find a super stiff person all of a sudden becomes
hypermobile because their consciousness isn't putting the
limiter on their movement. Stretching what's tight can be
helpful, but moving what's tight will always be more infinitely
helpful. The only time your brain will
let go of tension is if it feels safe in that range of motion.
So you cranking on stretches. It's why you feel tight doing
stretches one day and that same stretch, same tensions the next
day. Maybe it's 5% better and that's
great. Maybe 30 days later it's 10%
better, but it just kind of never really goes away and never
fully leaves you. And my God, take a couple days
off and you're right back to where you were day one with the
tightness. Stretching doesn't take change.
Tissue tension movement does. So if we can bring a level of
dynamic movement to your body, that is going to be the fastest
way to resolve pain and mechanical issues.
The only time stretching is prescribed usefully is when
movement is so problematic, it hurts like hell.
So great, let's try positions where there is no movement and
let's learn to breathe. Let's learn to relax into your
body. But once we're past that phase,
it's we got to get things moving because if we don't, nothing's
going to change. And I wish I learned that years
earlier. I would have saved so many hours
tugging on what was tight hoping it was just going to like
release and that wasn't my experience and it's not most.
What is 1 daily movement that you will never skip again for
the rest of your life? I'm going to share some hard
earned wisdom with you. And this is coming after having
been given so many exercises, these hour long routines.
And when you have all this work that you have to do physically
with your body, it feels like you're just piling more on top
of an already full life. And when movement and taking
care of your body starts to feel like a chore, we stop becoming
consistent. And then in order to try and
move again, it doesn't feel like just movement.
It feels like we're now having to work through the shame of
failing again or the pressure that we put on ourself that we
missed more days. So the advice I have for
everybody and what I'm going to share with you is do one
movement, come up with your minimum standard, non
negotiable. It does not have to be the
hardest exercise, nor does it have to be the most effective
exercise, nor the most valuable. The most enjoyable exercise for
you come your hardest days, your most hectic days, that is the
one thing that you do and you feel good that you did it and
showed up for yourself. Mine, very simple kneeling hip
flexor stretch. I run a lot.
I said a lot to teach people to move more.
That's what I do. My hips historically are tight,
so the most enjoyable thing is just getting a kneeling dynamic
hip flexor stretch in. I feel like emotionally that's
where I store a lot of tension. It's the one that is the easiest
for me to say yes to so I don't miss it.
It's non negotiable. It is what pulls me into my
movement practice. And on the days where I do it,
sometimes it's I'm already down on the ground and doing it, let
me do another one. And it always balloons into a
more advanced movement practice that day.
But it doesn't have to, and that's the point.
Such good advice. Can you show me what that looks
like real quick? I'll show you one thing.
It's my favorite. Am I still in frame?
All right, so here's my favorite movement in a kneeling position.
And if it doesn't feel comfortable in your knees, you
put like a pillow, something soft, both hands on your leg,
and you're just going to lean forward into it, right?
We're not like trying to throw our upper body forward, feel
that back hip stretch and then come out of it and we're going
to do this for one minute on your side.
Feels really good. Yeah, just rock back and forth.
The further that front foot is out, the more the stretches
we're going to get in the hip. Do you want to get your knee
like a perfect? OK, that was great.
So get your like the front knee over the toe even like as far as
you can go. We're.
Practicing exactly what happens in a squat.
We're practicing exactly what happens when we go down the
stairs. That the knee moves over the
toe. So this is my favorite because
two things are happening. Number one, we're stretching the
back hip and #2 it's just like a mini little strength signal into
the front leg. So a minute of forward, backward
motion on this side and then we're just going to switch.
I like that it's a stretch, but that you're moving through it.
That and that's all you're doing is you're just touching it and
then coming out of it. We'll bounce.
And over time we can get lower and it's just going to feel more
and more open and we get a little bit of strength, we get a
little bit of flexibility and mobility and stability.
So this is one of those exercises where we get a
well-rounded stimulus and a well-rounded outcome.
So this is my minimum standard of motion.
It feels the best. It's the easiest to say yes to.
I can do it when I'm typing out an e-mail.
I can do it when we're watching Love Island, whatever.
Not that we watch Love Island in this house.
I. Don't even know what that is.
Oh, great. Amazing.
You guys know? Nobody knows.
Yeah, we, yeah. I'll have to look it up.
OK, so that's for my hips. I'm going to show you one for
yours. So what I'd like you to do is
stand up and you can face me. All right, Both feet pointing
forwards and you can bend your knees.
I want just a really casual bend forward towards the ground.
So bend forward and reach towards the ground, OK, Kind of
like a gorilla. Keep your knuckles on the
ground. Good, just like that.
Bend your knees, lower your hips a little bit more, relax your
head and then now raise your hips up towards the ceiling
here. So higher hips.
Yep. Take a second and then come back
down. Lift your hips up, press your
knees back and then come back down.
We're not trying to rush in and out of each position.
I want you to take some big deep breaths.
Send the knees back. The neck relaxes there you.
Go yeah, I feel this. Yeah, see how we're trying to
almost use the shoulders and the neck to do this?
This is your one minute a day where you send work and tension
into the back of the legs. You're going to find it maybe
burns a little bit. There's a little bit of
strength, there's a little bit of stretch, big deep breaths.
Send the hips up and the knees back.
Hold for a second. Feel that benefit and come.
Out of it I'm like. Shaking as I'm doing.
That it's just one minute a day. And maybe for you it's a little,
another little hack is put the remote on the ground.
So maybe you and your husband like TV time, whatever it is,
maybe you like, you know, spending those last couple
minutes with your kids, put like the bottle on the ground.
Whatever you do, that's your signal.
If I'm going to bend forward, I might as well just get my minute
of exercise in If the remote is on the ground or if I got to get
down on the ground or bend forward to pick it up, I might
as well just do that minute of movement.
And it's these little environmental hacks that help
take care of you. You know, most people will get
way bigger of a house. It's more house than they need.
And they're running around like crazy taking care of their
house. A home should take care of you.
Your environment should take care of you.
So if you can start to hack your environment a little bit by
maybe putting the remote on the ground, a bottled water on the
ground, your laptop on the ground, your environment is
going to start to influence your movement as that's the signal
before I go get it, let me just get it done and out of the way
with. And now your environment is
taking care of you instead of you trying to force and always
like consciously have to say yes into things that you don't want
to do. And you can make it really easy.
Man thank you so much, this has been so helpful for me and I've
learned a ton from you and I know everyone listening well as
well. Where can people find you and
learn more about you and your program?
Yeah, so you can learn more about my program,
www.panacademy.net and any of the social handles at Pan
Academy. There's so much free information
out there. Check it out, give it a little
bit of time and watch what happens.
Awesome. Thank you so much.
Yeah, thanks for having me.